For many web portals and Internet Service Providers (ISPs), advertising is a major source of revenue. One form of advertising involves showing advertisers' ad banners on displayed web sites. For example, a preeminent portal such as Yahoo! displays advertisers' ads on web sites. In return, the advertisers pay a fee for each ad viewed by web users. Contracts to show ads are normally signed several weeks or months before ads get delivered and are often expressed in terms of page views. The duration of contracts typically ranges from one day to multiple years.
There are typically several types of web advertising contracts, including regular contracts, exclusive contracts and infinite contracts. Generally, for regular contracts, the advertisers purchase a designated number of ad views on a chosen space (web page or collection of pages), for exclusive contracts, advertisers purchase all the ad views on a chosen space, and for infinite contracts, advertisers purchase all the leftover ad views on a chosen space after other regular contracts related to that space have been fulfilled.
An advertising contract can also be entered into for searches related to a designated search word or phrase, whereby the contracted for ad is shown on a search results page when the contracted for search word or phrase is used. For example, when a user searches for “Pokemon” and an advertiser has contracted for the display of one of its ads on such search results page, that ad is displayed on the search result page. Inventory prediction is useful to predict how many times a word or phrase will be searched for in the future as the number of search results pages available for ads depends on the number of searches done.
Before entering into an advertising contract, it is advantageous to ensure that all the designated ad views can be successfully delivered during the contract period. If a space is oversold, the advertisers would not be happy, and if a space is undersold, revenue would be lost by not delivering ads on the space or by giving away the views to an infinite contract. Therefore, it is important to accurately predict the number of page views to be consumed in the future. This is called inventory prediction. In general, it is desirable to predict the total inventory available, e.g., on an entire network such as the Yahoo! network, as well as the inventory available for each space.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide an inventory prediction system (IPS) that takes into account and efficiently addresses the above and other issues.